We touched upon this subject in our article A Short Course in Economics. But the other day I caught a news program that had three conservatives on who were asked about their ideologies. I like this kind of thing. I grew up in a nation that no matter the differences between parties, we could still work together toward a common goal. The “others” were not the enemy. And boy how that has changed. Today we have political parties that both want to end violence on the street, unless you add the word “gun” in there. Sure, everyone wants to stop the violence, but add the word “gun” and suddenly we’re talking inviolable second amendment rights and “there’s nothing we can do about it,” and if you press too hard, you’ll get death threats.
So much for working together.
For a Nation divided against itself cannot stand.
Sam Houston
The Road to Fascism
Fascism is not only war on the poor, it is a war on the people. Even those who support fascism eventually learn that they are the losers and no matter how much they scream FREEDOM they have bound themselves in chains.
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”
Voltaire
Democracy is where freedom lies, or does it. Years ago, Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish historian supposedly predicted the end of democracy, although the authenticity of the quotation has come into question. Perhaps you’ve heard it?
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”
Why we’ve never voted ourselves all that money I’ll never know. It’s pretty clear that we’ve been voting for the rich and powerful to be pampered.
Today in the US we have a wealth gap that is nearly unprecedented. It can only be compared to the times in France directly preceding the French Revolution, and to the times preceding our Great Depression. And there is no denying that historically, economic upheavals can lead to fascism, because autocrats use the populism of redistribution of wealth as their campaign promise.
How to Take Over the World
- Undermine the people’s faith in the media and truth no longer matters.
- Polarize the people so that we dehumanize the other, and then human rights cease to be an obstacle.
- Marginalize experts and people will believe anything that resonates with their prejudices.
- Make promises of wealth for everyone!
Let us never forget those who ran for office in midterm 2022 elections promised to solve inflation, got elected, and then went after Hunter Biden, the Clintons (again), and the FBI . . . fruitlessly.
The Wage Gap – or the Redistribution of Wealth Upwards
I daresay that only the tiniest minds among us will believe that the wealthy have actually earned the profits as portrayed in this image. It is an enormous fallacy to assume that they’ve been working harder and deserve these profits, when the truth is painfully the opposite: wealth is driven by productivity and productivity is driven primarily by labor.
The simple conclusion is that labor is not being rewarded, but management sure is.
And if you factor in the moneys paying for production’s externalities (those costs picked up by taxation on the backs of the middle class such as infrastructure, the costs to the environment, and maintaining our safety net) what you have here is the worst form of socialism in the world, or simply put: the socialization of costs and the privatization of profits.
Conservatives hate the term “redistribution of wealth” when it goes to the poor and middle class, but they only hate people using the term when wealth is redistributed upwards. They like to call that capitalism. Which it ain’t.
So now back to the segment on the news that caught my attention. First off, allow me to point out one more quotation from a modern conservative, and let you deal with its implications.
“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”
South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, arguing against government food assistance for poor residents.
Here is the video.
What this woman is saying is just another way to say what Lt. Gov. Bauer said above. And the logic is quite simple: stop feeding the poor and they’ll become harder, more productive workers.
What she said just grated me: You know the government is too big when: “When no one wants to work because they don’t have to because the federal government is giving them so much money.”
The statement was so utterly fallacious I had to record it.
And we must vivisect her words. But first:
Big Government
What is big government? We hear it all the time. To the educated, it’s just a talking point. The conservatives who cry about big government, when in office, create the biggest government possible. They want cops in the classrooms to make sure teachers aren’t saying “gay” or reading the “wrong books” or addressing the issues of trans kids, or heaven forbid teaching a college level course in Critical Race Theory. Somehow logic has been abandoned and it’s more important to protect kids from the fact that 10% of any population (including the animal world) is gay while they’re being murdered at an unprecedented rate by weapons of war available to anyone.
If big government is measured by the growth of our debt or deficit spending, then again, those who decry big government are the ones creating it.
Now we can get back to
Vivisecting Her Words
“When no one wants to work . . . .”
- Unemployment is at its lowest in some fifty years.
- Psychologists tell us that people do not just work to get paid. If they did, they’d be quitting in record numbers. People work because doing something meaningful is a human trait. [Ref]
- Isn’t this the goal of getting rich? that we are so rich we don’t have to work and we can play? So when she says “nobody,” she means the one percent, right? They don’t want to work because we’ve redistributed all our wealth upwards to them (thus the wage gap). It’s they who sit on their yachts and drink fine champagne.
Her entire statement, in reality, is an attempt to shame the poor. Never in history has cutting off funds to the poor created a better labor force. That simply creates more crime. If people don’t have food, they steal food. However, again the conservatives tell us they steal to get drugs and alcohol, but they never mention that the wealthy get the best drugs and best alcohol.
And what about those states that demanded drug testing before distributing food stamps and a bit of welfare? They spent millions of dollars pretending to save the state money, but found very, very few people using drugs in their mad quest and shaming the poor.
Poor Shaming
John Fugelsang said something once that has become a meme (and we might be the only ones to lay out its attribution): “Rich people pay Fox people to convince average people that poor people are the problem.”
Bob Carlin cut right through the bullshit to the heart of the hypocrisy.
“Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.”
Since Ronald Reagan we’ve had trickle down (supply side) economics, or as Bush Sr called it: Voodoo Economics, and boy was he right.
Even Bill Clinton fell for this insanity, and following him Bush gave tax breaks to the wealthy and then Trump gave tax breaks to the wealthy and if you look at the numbers, it was the administrations that did not pamper the wealthy that created jobs and cut the deficit.
In fact were we to demand all that money back we’ve given the wealthy since Reagan, we’d pretty much take care of our debt.
But a look at congress today is disturbing: cuts to veterans, cuts to social security, cuts to health care. Don’t bother the wealthy, but lets get spending under control on the backs of the middle class and the poor.
All War is Class War
Throughout our history that statement has been used to attack the “radical left” as commies and agitators, or better still haters of capitalism.
The reality is that our capitalism has created the wealth gap—yes I’m repeating myself—and is the worst form of socialism on the planet.
Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.
Plato quoting Socrates
The clamber to wealth has always been a game of King of the Hill. Once on top, enough power is gained to create rules and laws to keep others from ascending and taking away that wealth (and power). They also make the rules that help garner even more wealth.
After WWII, Americans felt that a good education was the key to wealth, except it was the key to an upper middle class profession, but not real wealth. The right university with the “right people” was the key to wealth. At Harvard and Yale bonds are formed of the already wealthy who will graduate and go onto even more wealth, without much struggle.
By the nineteen seventies, there were no billionaires yet (that we knew of) but there were wealthy, and the richest of the rich had never been to college. Many had dropped out of elementary school. To be wealthy back then meant to work hard, and work right (learn the system, find the loopholes as well as the keys to wealth, and cut corners when possible) . . . and adopting nefarious ways didn’t hurt either.
“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
Attributed to Honoré de Balzac
The secret to staying wealthy is to make sure others can’t compete. Wealth is the ultimate freedom. One is free to rule over others and make the rules. Like that take on the Golden Rule: Those with the gold make the rules.
And thus the dumbing down of America. It started in the late seventies. The Koch brothers began buying up school boards (much cheaper than a senator) and text book companies. The attack of Critical Race Theory is simply the dumbing down of Americans on steroids.
One more time: CRT is a college level course that has never been taught in our school system. Duh.
But then again, real history has not been taught in our school system either. Nowhere before college will a student learn that the near genocide of our natives was greater than the holocaust in Nazi Germany. Nowhere before college (or during or after for that matter) will a student learn that our nation is founded on racism, while misogyny has been woven into the fabric of our society.
No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.”
Assata Shakur
And you can scream Commie! every time someone brings up class war, but it’s right there in front of our noses.
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Warren Buffett
Conservatives and progressives are not enemies. Those in power want them to be enemies because while they are at each other’s throats, they don’t realize that it’s the oligarchs who are the real enemies of society because they are making the rules that suppress everyone and keep their wealth protected from anyone who would horn in. They also want us to hate especially the poor, and blame them for the evils of society. They come right out and tell us that our tax dollars are going to feed the takers.
That is so far from the truth it’s laughable. Not long ago an economist worked this out: A person making $50,000 per year pays $36.82 for food stamps and $6.96 for welfare. That person also pays $257.75 for the military and upwards of $4,000 for corporate subsidies.
And the ironic part is those at the top sometimes say the quiet part out loud (you just have to be ready to hear it).
“Spending on the military doesn’t increase the deficit.”
Ronald Reagan
“I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.”
George W. Bush
“Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts.”
Dan Quayle (I just had to toss this one it. It’s one of my favorite quotations)
It’s all there right in front of us. And it’s all very believable. Except for a lot of Americans:
“Facts are stupid things.”
Ronald Reagan
Being Human
As human beings we pride ourselves in our intelligence, our technologies. We claim to be humane, and many claim to be Christian, but allow me to show you something. Here is a creature that performs the task Jesus told his followers to perform, but this birdbrain performs this task without being told to.
And then there Jimmy Carter, one of the most humane people to sit in the Oval Office.
If you’ve not read, A Short Course in Economics, you might want to bookmark it and read it later. I’m told it’s quite good.
